President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society

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While President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ may seem today as the most idealistic set of domestic programs that American politics has ever helmed, the reality is that many of the visionary plans passed during Johnson’s term had incredibly legitimate potential to eliminate poverty and racial injustice throughout the United States had they been properly supported. Though not all of the initiatives born out of the War on Poverty encountered opposition, some were still subject to intense scrutiny and controversy throughout the 1960s; perhaps the most notable of these contentious policies was the Community Action Program (CAP), which was passed as part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. This program allowed for the maximum feasible …show more content…
Johnson during the War on Poverty in the 1960s called ‘The Great Society’. Passed in 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act established the incredibly radical government program, which was progressive in that it gave both money and power directly to the people and asked them to come up with their own solutions to their individualized neighborhood problems. Community Action Agencies enabled the inclusion of individuals who were often excluded from the political process, and it allowed the federal government to empower impoverished citizens to work around the de jure racial segregation and de facto exclusion of the poor from the policy-making process. According to scholars Bailey and Duquette, “The combined effects of the EOA’s provisions was to allow Shriver [Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity] to circumvent state and local governments, which many believed had failed to alleviate poverty or, worse, been complicit or instrumental in its persistence.” Though this kind of social reform was well-received by low-income Americans (a reported 18 million people, or over half of America’s poor, were involved in CAP agencies ) local governments were none too pleased by the cropping up of rival governing bodies being administered by their constituents. Just as Bailey and Duquette suggested, the establishment of …show more content…
In contrast to the breadth and inclusivity of the Community Action Agencies, state and municipal governments appeared to urban communities as elite groups of powerful individuals who resisted the feedback, needs, and wishes of the people they had been elected serve. CAAs were forced to act as separate spheres of government because their own local authorities operated under a separate political agenda. Not only did CAAs not need local governmental permission to move forward with their plans, but they certainly had the funds to operate on their own: “Average, annual real CAP funding from 1965 to 1968 amounted to over a 25 percent increase relative to the sum of local government welfare expenditures in 1962.” Threatened by the power and influence of their respective Community Action Agencies, local governments refused to collaborate with their constituencies because of the lack of power and money they were receiving from the federal government, and instead they appealed to have the OEO relax the mandate of power that it had granted ordinary citizens in
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